After watching the movie “Crazy Rich Asians,” I wondered if it is accurate to label Asians in the United States and, specifically in Virginia, as rich. After delving into American Community Census data, I discovered that, in fact, Asians have been the wealthiest group in the United States for over three decades, and the wealthiest [...]Read Full Article →

Last month our office released Virginia’s population projections for 2020 until 2040. If you combed through the data tables, then you may have noticed one striking prediction—Whites will make up less than half of Virginia’s population by 2040. Recently, the Census Bureau made a similar projection for the nation as a whole. While these [...]Read Full Article →

Since the Changing Shape of American Cities report came out, I’ve fielded numerous questions about whether the trends cited had much to do with the subprime mortgage crisis and the recession that followed. The short answer is no. The recession may have accelerated things, but the shift began long before 2006. Data from 2000 shows a steady [...]Read Full Article →

Hillary Clinton won a majority in the Virginia Democratic primary on March 1st, while Donald Trump took a plurality of voters in the Republican primary. The Republican primary generated record voter turnout. Nearly 4 times as many votes were cast in the 2016 Republican primary as in the 2012 primary.Below are a series of [...]Read Full Article →

Here is a fun map showing the distribution of people across Virginia by the density of their census tract. Each color represents one third of the total population. For the purposes of this post, I’ll refer to them as the “densest third,” the “middle third,” and the “sparsest third.” I’m tempted to call them the [...]Read Full Article →

During most of the 20th century, the neighborhoods where people lived and worked in Richmond — even the boundaries of the city — were shaped by race. For decades after WWII, the city’s leaders fought a well-publicized battle to maintain this system and prevent the city’s population from becoming majority black. In recent years, Richmond [...]Read Full Article →

A while back, I wrote a post on the transformation of US cities over the last two decades, using Charlotte, Houston, Atlanta, and Denver as examples. That investigation, using graphs to show changes in the city from the core to the periphery, turned into a larger report that was just released today.In order to [...]Read Full Article →

In recent decades, the rapid growth of the Hispanic population in the United States has easily been the most discussed population trend. Fueled by immigration and births, the U.S. Hispanic population grew from 4 percent of the population in 1970 to 16 percent—or over 50 million—by 2010. The increase in the U.S. Hispanic population [...]Read Full Article →